This thread is intended to replace the Era II reference and FAQ. Be aware that there is still some valid reference material in the Era II thread that has not been brought over to this thread, but anything having to do with units is out of date.

Ground units are the only units that participate ground combat. Ground units are built by structures on a handful of world designations, most notably infantry academies and capitals. A planet is captured by winning a ground combat battle against any ground units stationed on it. Ground units must be transported using jumptransports. In practice, most or all defending space combat units must usually first be destroyed before transports can land safely. Ground combat is straightforward and the stronger force usually wins, although more advanced infantry types can prevail over slightly stronger forces of less advanced infantry. If one force is significantly weaker/smaller than the other force at any point during combat, it will be captured by the other side. Captured units join the enemy.

Planetary defense units participate in space combat. They are built by unique structures on any planet of at least the minimum TL. Defense structures are manually built by the player. Defenses above TL7 must have the preceding defense structure built first. A percentage of the planet's total WU output can be allocated to any defense structure. Defense units only participate in space combat and do not affect ground combat. Defense units cannot be moved from the planet on which they are built.

Jumpships participate in space combat. Jumpships are built by the jumpship yard structure on designated jumpship yard planets and on imperial & sector capitals under the "Fire and Movement" doctrine. Jumpships can also be purchased from Mesophon worlds. All jumpship classes participate in space combat; jumptransports land ground forces during invasions but do not participate in ground combat directly and do not fire their weapons in space combat. Jumptransports stationed on planets remain on the ground and will be captured if the world is captured.

Starships are built by the starship yard structure on designated starship yard planets and on imperial & sector capitals under the "Strength and Honor" doctrine; planets building starships and starship autofacs (which build starship components) may not be in nebula. Starships can also be purchased from Mesophon worlds. All starship classes participate in space combat. Starships cannot enter nebulas but can otherwise move freely.

Ramjets (a.k.a. ramships) are built by the ramjet yard structure on designated ramjet yard planets; ramjet yards and ramjet autofacs (which supply ramjet components) must be in nebula. Ramjets can also be purchased from Mesophon worlds. All ramjet classes participate in space combat. Ramjets cannot leave nebulas and usually cannot move between different nebula types (e.g. from a dark nebula into a light nebula), although this is possible in a few rare cases.

Citadels and Jumpmissiles

There is only one class of jumpmissiles, the Partisan-class. Jumpmissiles are also known as "LAMs". Jumpmissiles are a special weapon used to instantly attack fleets. Jumpmissiles can't attack planetary defenses or ships stationed on planets. They are built by TL7+ citadels and cost 900 WU, 2 hex, 2 trillum, and 1 light jumpdrive each (SCI WU cost = 1000). They have a half-life of 4 days.

Jumpmissiles may be manually fired at any fleet within 100LY, including fleets that are moving (jumpmissiles are the only way to attack moving fleets). The number of jumpmissiles fired in each volley is determined by the game, rather than the player. However, players can manually order as many volleys as they like. Jumpmissiles cannot be manually fired from a planet that is not within the 250LY administrative range of a capital or sector capital.

Jumpmissiles will be automatically fired against fleets that attempt to invade planets within their range. Although jumpmissiles can't fire at fleets orbiting their citadel, citadels within missile range of one another can protect each other from attack.

Jumpmissile strikes seem to be instantaneous against moving fleets and nearly instantaneous against stationary fleets (the missiles arrive immediately and then travel within the system to hit the target- this can be seen on the visualizer). When a jumpmissile volley reaches its target system, each missile fragments into 16 missile submunitions; submunitions do 180 damage and have strength:8 and 100 range (they do not do Area of Effect damage). Jumpmissiles are deadliest against moving fleets; every submunition will hit when fired at a moving fleet. If stationary fleets orbiting planets have units with missile protection, these wings will attempt to use it to protect themselves against incoming jumpmissile strikes.

If a citadel is redesignated, the remaining jumpmissiles can still be fired normally until they are all lost to attrition.

Movement and combat

Movement

Fleets leave orbit and begin moving at the very end of the watch in which they are given a movement order. Watch time is shown by the little pie underneath your Empire Name; when the pie fills up all fleets move and a new watch begins. Starship and ramjet fleets may take one or two additional watches after being ordered off a planet to actually leave orbit, and will wait for one watch after arriving in orbit before they will accept attack orders.

You can issue new destination orders to moving fleets at any time.

Jumpship movement

Jumpbeacons exist on the imperial capital, jumpship yards, and on sector capitals under the F&M doctrine; they are a property of these designations and can only be removed by redesignation. Non-explorer jumpships can't travel to planets outside the 250LY radius of the player's jumpbeacons on their own. If jumpships end up outside beacon range (e.g, if a nearby beacon is captured,) they can still jump back into the range of a friendly beacon. Jumpfleets can cross space outside of a beacon range as long as their movement ends inside a beacon's range. If you put jumpships in a fleet with starships or ramjets, they will go anywhere the other ships can, at the speed of the slowest ship in the fleet. If a mixed fleet containing both jumpships and other ships turns into a jumpfleet while moving (e.g., if it gets hit by jumpmissiles and all escorts are destroyed), it will stop moving and you must issue it a new movement order.

Pathfinding

Fleets will not always use the best route to get to a destination if there are obstacles (e.g. nebulas or rift zones) in the way. You may need to manually order fleets to travel a planet that is on the way to the destination, then give them a new movement order once they arrive. Fleets often have trouble finding paths through rift zone regions, but it is possible for ships to cross through them with some diligent searching.

Fleets can pathfind and move outside the boundaries of the map. Nebulas are not absolute impediments to starship movement if starships are able to go around them.

Fleet Combat

Units will begin an attack immediately when they are given an attack order. The same is true for a retreat order given after combat has started. Fleets arriving at a planet where combat is occurring enter combat immediately. The "attack" and "invasion" orders are functionally the same, except that after most or all defending units have been destroyed in an invasion transports will attempt to land ground units and take over the planet. Transports can be manually forced to land at any time by selecting them in the combat visualizer and ordering them to land; this can turn an attack into an invasion.

Several empires can participate in a single battle. For a fleet from a third empire is going to join an ongoing battle between two sides, the player picks a fleet to attack and all subsequent combat during the battle will be against that fleet's empire unless wings get manually ordered to attack the other side too (I believe).

Combat messages are buggy. During an invasion all fleets orbiting a planet will have their status given as "invading", even if they belong to empires that are not actually participating in the battle.

Penalties for attacking weaker empires

Empires that attack empires that have less than 50% of their relative "imperial might" are penalized. If a large empire invades or attacks non-threatening fleets* of a small empire, social order will be temporarily lowered on a random scattering of their planets. This penalty is applied for each individual hostile act and can cause widespread civil wars, especially if several attacks are ordered. If a small empire invades or attacks non-threatening fleets of a large empire, the large empire is allowed to counterattack them up to a certain undetermined limit, after which a social order penalty may still apply. Players are warned by the game before performing an act likely to result in a social order penalty.

* Fleets orbiting worlds that are not part of the larger empire. There is no penalty for attacking threatening fleets (fleets orbiting your own worlds) or for firing jumpmissiles. Imperial might is based on population, not unit counts.

"Habitat" in this table indicates where in space a planet can occur. Earth-like planets can occasionally occur in bright nebulas; these worlds will be imperial capital candidates (other player empires can spawn from them.)

Mineral abundances given here are averages for planet type; individual planets vary but will always include the same mineral types as others in their class.

There is a short period every minute or so when the game client is getting information from the server and commands don't get acknowledged immediately. Just keep trying to enter your command until the game accepts it. There is also sometimes a slight delay before changes to trade route designations and fleet travel paths show up on screen.

Why does my game client crash when I press the little button in the upper left hand corner or if I try to zoom in on a moving fleet?

The button in the upper-left-hand corner creates a high-resolution image of the galactic map, but it only works properly in some browsers. It takes a couple seconds and will cause problems for slower computers. It may work in Chrome, creating a popup which is usually autoblocked but can be seen by clicking "allow" in the upper-right-hand corner of the browser. It does not seem to work in Firefox or Internet Explorer (Thanks to Wayward Device for explaining how this works).

The game client crashing when zooming on a moving fleet is a known bug. It should rarely be a problem in normal play since there's no reason to zoom in on a moving fleet.

Why do my fleets and infantry keep shrinking?

You lose a small % of all units and most resources every watch- but so does everybody else. This is called "attrition". The only thing you can do is always be building more! Capital ships and some resources have a higher "half-life", which translates to a lower attrition rate. Hexacarbide doesn't undergo attrition. Very small fleets may not lose a unit every turn, but they still occasionally lose units and will eventually vanish completely. Attrition doesn't seem to be affected by whether a unit is stationed on a world or is part of a fleet.

Can I play on a phone or tablet?

Maybe. Anacreon loads on some mobile devices, but the interface is crowded on small screens and the game doesn't recognize touchscreen commands like pinching to zoom. It will be harder to move fleets around without right-clicking, but you can use the "destination" button. The game might run slowly or have refresh issues on devices that don't have a lot of RAM or have slow processors.

Why can't I designate a new sector capital?

Sector capitals must be more than 250LY from any of your existing capitals. Inconveniently, jumpfleets can't go further than 250LY away if your only jumpbeacon is on your capital. Designate a jumpship yards near the edge of your capital's range to expand the area in which your jumpfleets can operate, or attach some transports and infantry to a starship fleet and send it off to conquer a distant world. Jumpships can travel beyond beacon range if they are in a fleet with starships or ramjets.

I captured a world within 250 light-years of my new sector capital. Why can't give it any orders or change the designation?

It takes 24 hours after a sector capital is designated before it actually begins to project influence. Planets outside the influence zone of a capital can't be given orders (you can deploy or remove fleets and infantry, and planets TL 5 or higher can be designated as a sector capital, but that's it.) You can track the progress from the overview tab; you'll see a little clock that shows you how long until the capital will start operating. Sector capitals do start building special units immediately after being designated, so the 24 hour period won't be totally wasted.

Why did my capital stop producing ships?

If you built tech projects to increase your capital to TL 9 or higher, most or all of the ship classes that your capital can build will require chronimium. You don't have chronimium on your starting capital world, but you can't continue to build the low-tech ships that don't require it if the capital's TL is high. Import chronimium from a world that you have designated as a chronimium processor. (A world must be TL 7 or higher to refine chronimium), or destroy the quantum or post-industrial structure on your capital.

If you didn't increase your capital's TL, it might be because you changed your empire's doctrine. Strength & Honor doesn't build transports on the capital; Law & Order only builds special infantry; and Trade & Industry doesn't build anything! Change your doctrine back to Fire and Movement and don't even think about the other doctrines until you have a couple dozen worlds.

I designated a world as a jumpship yards, but it's only building explorers!

Your capital can build jumpship components at its Fleet HQ structure, but jumpship yards must have a trade route importing jumpship components from an autofac planet or a trade hub. You can drop off a million jumpdrives using transports but the yards still won't build anything except explorers without it had a trade route.

TL 9 and 10 jumpyards require chronimium for almost everything (except the Adamant-class, buildable at TL 9 but replaced by the chronimium-requiring Undine at TL 10) and they need to be importing from jumpship component autofacs that have high enough TL to build their required components. See the ship tables for information about what each ship requires; generally speaking each ship class that uses components buildable the same TL. The only exceptions are the Reliant jumptransport (TL6, requires TL5 light jumpdrive), Undine jumpcruiser (Tl10, all components are TL9), and the battlestation defense (TL9, requires TL7 heavy missile launcher).

Keep an eye on yards as they increase in tech, as they will automatically dedicate a % of their labor to new ship models as they become available - even if you don't want the new types. Manually adjust these %s to match what you want to build; don't let the game do it for you. If a yard can't get the components and resources that it needs, some or all of the labor allocated to building ships will default to the simplest ship class it can build (usually a gunship or explorer). If you can't get the resources that you need for even that, all the labor is wasted; the guys and gals in the yard go on permanent coffee break until your world is able to import all of the components and import or extract all of the resources it needs to build ships.

Starship and ramjet yards can always build gunships as long as they have the necessary mineral resources, since gunships don't require any components. The same caution about auto-dedication of labor to new ship models applies, though. Starfrigates and starcruisers need components that are built at dedicated starship or ramjet autofacs.

Unlike yards, autofacs can still build low-TL components even at TL 10. This is true for every kind of autofac. Jumpship autofacs' light jumpdrives are also used by citadels to build jumpmissiles; starship autofacs' heavy missile launchers are also used to build battlestation planetary defense units on planets that have completed a battlestation program. Keep these additional component uses in mind when locating your autofac worlds, citadels, etc.

I built all the defense structures to defend my planet, why aren't any of the defenses being built very fast?

Structures produce disproportionately more when a larger percentage of total labor is being dedicated to them. You can see this by changing the labor assigned to a defensive structure from 5% to 10% and reducing the labor assigned to a different defensive structure from 5% to zero. After a few minutes, more than twice as many defensive units will be getting built at the structure with 10% labor, and the absolute amount of labor being used by the structure will be more than twice as much as it was when you were building two types of defenses.

A planet's labor pool is not a fixed quantity; the fewer things your world is doing, the more labor will be available in total. This is why it makes sense to import resources from dedicated extractor planets rather than have every world extract its own resources. Likewise, it usually doesn't make sense to build small amounts of multiple kinds of defenses. Instead, focus on only building one or two kinds- or don't build any, and rely entirely on ships for defense.

All defenses except GDMs need hexacarbide, and advanced defenses (armored satellites, plasma towers, battlestations) require chronimium too. If your planet doesn't have deposits of these or a trade route to a dedicated extractor planet, you can only build GDMs for defense. You can assign labor to other defenses but they won't get build; the labor will all be wasted. If your world isn't importing minerals, it will have to dedicate labor to extracting them, which will once again have a disproportionately negative impact on your planet's primary industry.

I imported tech from a foundation and the planet's tech level went too high!

By default, worlds try to go up to the same level as the foundation. It's not a good idea to raise a world's TL too fast, so click on the trade route once you've established it and change it to the desired tech level.

Foundations automatically raise their own tech level to match your capital's TL, unless their natural TL is higher than the capital's. If this is the case, the foundation's TL will remain higher, but will not uplift planets above the capital's TL.

Check the foundation structure on your foundation world to make sure it's producing enough levels to supply all the planets. If it isn't, give it more labor by either reducing defense structure allocations, building habitat structures, or importing more resources.

Foundations won't uplift other planets above the capital's TL, and won't normally be able to uplift the imperial capital.

You'll usually have the opposite problem; your foundations will produce a bunch of extra TLs that aren't needed by surrounding worlds. Allocate labor to defenses until you're only generating a small surplus of tech. Remember: if an enemy captures your foundation, all the worlds it supports will slowly revert to their original TLs or TL 5, whichever is higher. Autonomous-designated worlds getting tech from a foundation will revert to their prior TL even if it was lower than TL5.

I'm not sure what determines the amount of time it takes a world to revert a level. Worlds at TL 10 seem to revert to TL 9 almost immediately, but going from TL 9 to TL 8 seems to take a lot longer.

I conquered a planet, why did it go into civil war so quickly?

Try bringing a couple thousand units of trillum with you when you conquer a world, or don't redesignate it immediately.

Populations require consumer goods: organic food, durable goods for planets at or above TL4, and luxuries for planets at or above TL 7. Independent worlds don't stockpile consumer goods; when you conquer a world, total efficiency drops and structures operate at reduced capacity for a couple of watches. Structures operating at reduced capacity will have small white % numbers below and to the left of the larger labor allocation percentages on their boxes. If you immediately redesignate a captured world, efficiency and operating capacities will drop even more.

If the planet's consumer goods autofac structure can't produce enough goods for a few turns, people will experience shortages of durable goods and luxuries; millions will die if there's an organic food shortage. You can import consumer goods through trade routes, but it will take a couple of minutes after assignment before a trade route works at full capacity. Consumer goods shortages hurt social order every turn they occur; bigger shortages have worse effects. TL may also drop to compensate, since people on lower-tech worlds require fewer consumer goods. Efficiency also takes a hit when people die. Shortages are most likely on worlds with trace trillum deposits, since the world will have to allocate a lot more of the available labor to mining trillum to run the autofac.

See the "Social Order" section of the guide for more info on civil wars.

I can't stop people from dying from life support/radiation meds/etc. shortages on a planet and I can't import them from another world!

You're probably experiencing a trillum shortage; your world isn't producing or importing enough trillum to run both the consumer goods autofac and the habitat structure that produces the needed survival resource. Survival goods can't be exchanged with trade routes. Import trillum with a trade route; if this isn't possible, drop some off with transports as a stopgap. Stop building defenses- they all consume trillum. (The planet will try to do this on its own, but sometimes won't pull enough labor away from the structures).

This can also happen at times when recently-conquered worlds are increasing in TL and/or population; they seem to produce barely enough survival goods to get by and even slight population increases can put them over the edge.

You can also use transports to move survival goods from stockpiles on worlds of the same type to the world experiencing the shortfall; don't take too many!

What are jumpmissiles for? Why isn't my Citadel building any?

Citadels use light jumpdrives to build jumpmissiles. You need a trade route importing from a jumpship components autofac or from a trade hub that is importing from a jumpship components autofac.

Jumpmissiles are single-use weapons that are useful for attacking fleets of ships that move through their area of influence (a circle 100 LY in radius). Jumpmissiles are the only weapon that can attack fleets that are moving through space. You normally have to order them to fire, but they will fire automatically against fleets invading your worlds within their area of influence (they don't fire against fleets invading the citadel itself, however.) They are more effective when manually fired against moving fleets, since orbiting fleets seem to take fewer casualties and can intercept missiles if the fleets contain ships with missile protection (like Stingers or Eldritches). Jumpmissiles are devastating if you can hit a moving jumpship fleet with them. Starship fleets move slowly enough that you will likely be able to catch incoming fleets in space if you log in every 24 hours or so.

When a citadel is invaded by an enemy fleet, the attacking fleet will destroy the jumpmissiles from orbit before landing transports; unlike planetary defenses, the jumpmissiles don't fire defensively at attacking ships.

Exotroops are 40 times stronger than regular infantry and 10 times stronger than armored infantry! Why would I ever want to build anything BUT exotroops?

One infantry autofac can supply all the armored vehicles needed for one infantry academy building armored infantry. If the same academy is assigned to build nothing but exotroops, you'll need three or four infantry autofac planets in order to supply enough exoarmor (and you'll also need chronimium.) Unless your empire is enormous, you'd probably prefer to not need to dedicate this many planets to infantry production.

Exotroops are a little weaker than their stats make them appear because other infantry types are less willing to surrender against them. This prolongs fights involving exotroops and results in fewer enemy units captured. This might be because a small force of exotroops inflicts fewer casualties per individual combat round than a larger force of infantry with the same ground forces strength (the exotroops also take fewer casualties since they're so well armored). Groups of more than 150 or so exotroops seem to be nearly immune to basic infantry and always beat them without taking any losses in my tests. Exotroops do have lower attrition, though.

I set up a trade route, but nothing is being exchanged!

Trade routes only import resources produced by the primary (designation-defined) structure on a planet. Trillum extractors only export trillum, starship component autofacs only export starship components, etc. Yards, citadels, sector capitals and academies don't export anything (exception: under the Trade & Industry doctrine, your capital and sector capitals will turn into trade hubs). If you redesignated a world and have a huge stockpile of resources just sitting on it, you can use transports to move them to a world that can use them.

Trade routes from hubs will import any resource that the hub is importing.

If your trade route is from a supplying planet and to a hub, you may be experiencing a bug. Trade hubs sometimes won't import or export trillum properly if they're being supplied by only one extractor. Connecting a second trillum extractor resolves the problem. This may also happen with luxury goods and jumpship components.

I captured a world but it has a really low TL that isn't increasing.

All worlds in your empire <TL5 will increase in TL to TL5 (spacefaring) - but only after they have been given a designation. You may want to give a newly-conquered world a designation that requires a higher TL than the planet has. In this case, you will have to designate it as something else (consumer goods autofac is a safe choice) until it reaches TL5. It will suffer a temporary efficiency hit every time you give it a new designation, though. Alternately, you can leave the world as an autonomous world and import tech levels from a foundation if you have one within 1000LY.

I captured a world but I can't import from it and the import/export range is really short!

To import resources from a world, you need to build a spaceport on it. You want spaceports on every world, since they increase import/export range with no downside. Starports can be built at TL5 and are completed in about 5 minutes. Trade hubs include the "starport" structure. Starports have the same functionality as a spaceport but they are built instantaneously and allow the world to export goods that it imports from other worlds, extending and simplifying trade networks.

My fleet can't find a path to the world that I want to send it to!

Starship fleets can't pass through nebulas, ramjet fleets can't leave nebulas. Ramjet fleets sometimes can't pass between light and dark nebulas, but it's hard to predict. If there's no straight path to a target, the game's pathfinding algorithm will consider a few alternate paths and then give up, even if a complicated path exists that could get your ships where you want them to go. When this happens, you may have to send your fleets to a closer world and then redirect them from there. Fleets can path through unexplored space to a known target UNLESS the unexplored space contains rift zones; unexplored space containing a rift zone is usually impassable until it has been mapped. Rift zones interfere with fleet pathing but are not an absolute barrier. Jumpship fleets are much better at finding paths through rift zones than ramjet fleets.

If my capital gets captured, which sector capital will become the new imperial capital?

I believe that the new capital will be the established sector capital (with a completed administration structure projecting influence) that has the highest space forces AND is TL7, TL8, or TL9 AND is connected to at least one trade route. If no sector capital meets all these criteria, another sector capital (such as one that is still building the administration structure or one that has a TL that is too high or low) will be selected. I don't know which criterion is most important.

Build lots of ships and consolidate them onto your capitals periodically. This protects the capitals and ensures that your space navy isn't"defeated in detail" by a larger fleet that goes through and picks off individual fleets at yards one by one

Do the same thing with infantry. If an enemy can't bring together enough infantry and transports to invade a world successfully, it's impregnable.

Build citadels with overlapping missile radiuses, so that they can defend one another (and your planets) with jumpmissile strikes.

Fortify jumpship yards that are within jumpship range of enemy worlds. If an enemy fleet invades it, they can use the jumpbeacon immediately.

Establish sector capitals, trade hubs and jumpship yards in isolated small nebulas that you fully control or in clearspace pockets inside nebulas. These worlds are unreachable by starships AND ramjets.

Use diplomacy to make nearby empires your allies.

Offensively, you can:

Attack sector capitals as soon as another empire tries to establish them near your worlds. Once an enemy has an operational sector capital, it's much easier for them to annex your worlds by invading them and immediately incorporating them into their trade network.

Immediately attack and redesignate or raze (pull off food/survival goods until it revolts) any jumpship yards established within 250LY of your jumpship yards around your core. An enemy can leapfrog through your empire by invading one yard (obtaining a beacon), and then proceeding to the next yard in beacon range, etc. Don't let anybody get a toehold!

The most important advice I can give to a starting player is: capture planets soon, but don't lose all your starting ships by attacking another planet if the odds aren't clearly in your favor. You might luck out and your starting capital will be a world that was formerly part of another empire, with lots of high-tech ships already on it. More likely, you'll start with the bare minimum, which can be as little as 1000 Stinger jumpships, 250 Vanguard explorers, a few thousand infantry and some Reliant jumptransports. This is barely enough for to do anything.

If you follow this guide you will soon command vast starfleets and the galaxy will tremble before you!

The Very, Very Short Starting Guide

At the beginning of the game, deploy one or two fleet of Vanguards and send them around looking for independent worlds close to your capital that are only defended by GDM silos and infantry (or only infantry). When you find one, send all your Stingers and order them to attack it. You will probably win the space battle even if the enemy has more space forces, because Stingers have point defense that intercepts missiles (GDMs, hypersonics, armored satellites and battlestations are all missile-type). Planets under TL 4, and "primordial", "hadean", or "nebular" worlds of any TL, should only have GDM defenses. You might want to attack these first.

If there are no GDMs or other defenses, just infantry, skip to the next step.

Deploy a fleet of transports with infantry; bring as much infantry as you can carry. Invade!

Immediately give worlds under TL5 a designation- this causes their TL to gradually rise to TL5. At TL5 a lot more planet designations become available.

If possible, create a trade route by ordering your capital to "import from" newly conquered worlds. If the world is far from the capital you may need to wait until it rises to TL5 and you can build a saceport. Some designations (autonomous, capitals, academies and yards) don't export anything; don't bother trying to import from them. Later on you will make your trade network more complicated but at the start of your game even having a little extra trillum or consumer goods going to your capital helps a lot.

Here is the less short starting guide:

Beginning tasks for your capital:

Click on your capital and click "import from". The grey circle is the area in which you want to conquer planets first. It's less than the control radius of your capital, but any world outside the grey circle can't form a trade route straight to your capital and won't be useful right away.

The control radius of the capital is also your empire's current "jump beacon" range. Jumpships, jumpcruisers and jumptransports can't move on their own across the map, they can only move to within a 250LY radius of planets that have jump beacons (however, explorers can go anywhere). The capital, jumpship yards, and sector capitals in the Fire & Movement doctrine have jump beacons. You can combine any jumpship type with starships or ramjets in a fleet to move them around the map at the slower gunship speed and conquer remote worlds. You don't have any starships or ramjets yet, though (if your capital was previously part of another empire you might have inherited a few. This is rare.)

For now, click on each defense structure (GDMs, HELs, autocannons, maybe hypersonics and/or armored satellites) and set the labor allocation to 0%. Later on you will want to build defenses, but for now in order to expand you need ships.

Click on the Fleet HQ structure and allocate only 5%-10% to Vanguard explorers (you'll always want some explorers because they're useful for exploring and recon, but they are very weak in combat) and maybe 10-15% to Reliant jumptransports. You could also set 5-10% to building infantry, but if you have around 10,000 infantry already don't bother - you'll be fine with that many for quite a while. The rest should go to building either Stingers or Adamants.

If the independent planets near you have a lot of missile-type defenses (GDMs, hypersonics, armored constellations) but not many cannon-type defenses (HELs, autocannons, plasma towers), assign most or all of the rest of the labor to Stingers. Otherwise, assign most of it to Adamants. Individual Adamants require more Work Units and minerals to build and they don't have missile protection, but they have a lot more armor and their missiles are both more damaging and longer-ranged, which is important for fighting planetary defenses. All ship classes are weak against some units and strong against others. In player vs. player combat, basic jumpships like the Stinger will defeat basic jumpcruisers at cost parity despite having a weaker Space Forces rating. This is because basic jumpships have point defense that provides some protection against missiles.

Do not switch doctrines right now. You'll want to stay in Fire and Movement for a long time. Switching doctrines will hurt your capital's efficiency and you won't be able to build as many ships (or any ships depending on which doctrine you switch to.) Once you have 20-30 worlds you might explore other doctrines.

Beginning tasks for your fleets

Deploy several fleets of 150-200 explorers to explore all the space around your capital out to at least 250 light-years (there's scale bar in the upper right-hand corner). Deploy 10 or so explorers out of the fleet every time you orbit an interesting-looking independent world in range of your capital and leave them in orbit while the rest of your fleet keeps exploring. This will let you keep an eye on the planet's defenses until you're ready to attack it.

Red planets belong to other players. If you find another player's capital, you can send messages to them from the "Empire" tab on their capital. If another player messages you, it will reveal their capital's location to you.

To capture a planet, you usually used to need at least >150% of the planet's " space forces". Confusingly, your transports count towards "space forces" but don't actually fight. Transports have armor and guns but they won't fire them due to a bug. Your fleet's "real" strength is its "space forces" when all the ships that are not transports are deployed to it. If a planet is defended by cannons or a mix of cannons and hypersonic missiles you want at least 200-250%. If the planet is only defended by GDMs, space forces are less important- a small Stinger fleet will be able to take the planet, since Stingers' missile defense can intercept incoming missiles pretty well. Because of the recent rebalancing, nobody knows how good of a measurement of fleet strength Space Forces are. Test different attacks and report back in this thread.

If you can't find a planet weak enough to conquer nearby, log off and try again in around 24 hours; this gives your capital time to build more ships. It's frustrating to not be able to do anything right away but once you start capturing and establishing trade routes with other planets your empire will really get rolling.

You won't be able to capture many high-tech independent worlds at first, since their defenses can be quite strong. Worlds around TL 3-5 are the best to conquer starting out; they usually don't take long to go up to TL 5 once given a designation and they don't have many defenses. (Some low-TL worlds will be old player worlds that rebelled; these planets may have strong defenses left over.) Lower TL worlds will improve to TL 5 on their own once you give them a designation, but this can take a few minutes. If you can't designate them what you want them to be because their TL is too low, designate them as consumer goods autofacs. Once their TL rises you can redesignate them. Always build a spaceport at TL 5, it increases trade route range by a lot and costs nothing.

You may see TL 9 and 10 planets with trace trillum that have no defenses at all. These planets look appealing but they're resource traps- they're barely able to produce enough consumer goods to support their own populations and when you conquer them their efficiency will decrease, causing immediate shortages that will send the planet into civil war. Don't try taking these planets until you have dedicated trillum planets up and running nearby so that you can supply them immediately after capturing them.

You can grow your empire any way you like, but I suggest conquering planets in this order:

A planet with "abundant" or at least "major" trillum supplies. This will probably be a desert or fiery world. Designate it as a trillum extractor. Trillum is needed for almost every production task on almost every planet. Set your capital to import from the extractor. (No planet will ever need to import from your capital, since it produces ships which can't be exported through trade routes.) If the trillum planet is TL 1 or 2 you'll have to designate it as a consumer goods autofac and wait for it to go up to TL3 before you can redesignate it as a trillum extractor.

An earthlike or ocean world; if none are available, an underground world; if none are available, a desert or empyreal world. Designate this planet as a consumer goods autofac world and set it to import from the trillum extractor. The trillum will be used by the consumer goods autofac to make durable goods (the CG autofac also makes organic food, which only requires labor to make). All worlds that are TL4 and higher require durable goods and will be more efficient if they can import them from a CG autofac planet instead of making them locally. If a world is TL 7 or higher, it will also use the trillum to produce luxury goods; TL 7 worlds (like your capital) need luxury goods in addition to food and durable goods. Once the autofac is running at 100% (when the little number on the left side of the structure box goes away, about 5-10 minutes), set the trillum extractor to import from it. You'll soon be generating a huge surplus of trillum and consumer goods. Set the capital to import from the CG autofac to benefit from this surplus. You'll see your capital's ship production increase since it no longer needs to dedicate as much (or any) labor to making consumer goods. The previously-mentioned world classes are preferable for CG autofac because many of them get bonuses to food production and none of them are vulnerable to life-support related bugs if asked to export too many resources.

A TL 5 or higher planet with at least minor hexacarbide deposits. Designate it a jumpship autofac and have it import from everything but the capital. This planet will build the various jumpship components that all jumpships except explorers require. Set the capital to import from this world. After a few watches your capital should only be producing hexacarbide and units, and it will be producing them a whole lot faster than when you first started out. If you're building Adamant-class jumpcruisers, the capital will still be running an autofac to build light missile launchers unless the autofac planet is TL 7 or higher. This is because the Adamant uses two components and the light missile launcher component requires TL 7 to build. Building jumpship components requires some trillum, so pay attention to your supply.

At this point you might want to add another consumer goods autofac, a hexacarbide foundry planet, or a starship yard. Abundant hexacarbide is common, usually on barren and underground worlds, and is needed to build every ship and every defense except GDMs. As you conquer more worlds you'll need either to keep setting up more consumer goods autofacs and trillum extractors to supply them or be content with reduced production. High-tech worlds need a lot of consumer goods.

Gunships, built at starship yards, move around a lot slower than jumpships but are not restricted by jump beacons, do not require components, and currently seem to be a good value for their cost. Add a starship yard to build gunships and wage war beyond your borders or take out planets that are too tough to crack with jumpships and jumpcruisers. You can also build starfrigates and starcruisers, which have long-range weapons that can crack independent world's planetary defenses without taking losses, if you add a starship autofac.

Tips for your young and expanding empire

Build habitat structures whenever they're available. These raise a planet's max population, which means more labor. Don't build them if you are already having trouble supplying a planet with resources; they are also not strictly necessary on foundations and trade hubs. Habitats take a while to build. The largest hab structures for hazardous worlds are arcologies, available at TL 7. For habitable worlds, the largest are planetary arcologies at TL 8. Planetary arcologies takes 3 days to build! At 100% efficiency, a TL 8 habitable world with a planetary arcology will produce about twice as much labor as a TL7 hazardous world with a regular arcology.

Keep an eye on actual unit production through the "production" tab. The "structures" tab only reports how many units a world is trying to produce. If your planet is trying to import more resources or ship components than it is getting (indicated by a number in brackets on a given resource of component in the production tab), your world is wasting labor. Either switch to cheaper unit types, move labor into defenses on the unit-producing world (defenses are cheaper than units), or add more resource/autofac worlds.

You will need a lot of chronimium once you start building ships that are TL 8 and higher. The TL7 Victory-class starcruiser and armored constellation defense structure also require chronimium. Securing abundant chronimium planets is really important if there are any nearby. Chronimium uses a lot of trillum to produce, so keep your chronimium processor planets supplied by your trillum extractors.

Pay attention to what kind of ships your neighbors have and build or station proper deterrents on your most vulnerable planets accordingly. Build citadels to deter starship attack and take out nearby jumpship yards to prevent them from attacking you with jumpships. If enemy jumpships are able to operate inside your borders, your empire will be very vulnerable.

If a planet imports a resource from two planets, it will default to importing 50% of its need from each. You can manually change the allocation by clicking on the trade route; if one planets is producing much more than another you aren't forced to draw equally from both. For example, if planet Trillum A produces twice as much as planet Trillum B and your capital imports from both, you can change the Trillum B route to only import 33% of the capital's need and the Trillum A route will change to 67% by default. Once you manually change a trade route it will stay at the assigned % forever, so if you want a trade route to start auto-balancing again you will need to cancel and recreate it.

Armored infantry are a lot tougher than standard infantry and you'll need fewer transports to move them around. Building fewer transports lets you build more attack ships. When your resource supplies seem stable, set up an infantry academy and an infantry autofac. One autofac can fully supply one academy that's building 100% armored infantry, provided that the worlds have the same labor output. You must manually order the academy to build 100% armored infantry, otherwise it will build 50% regular, 50% armored. If both your autofac and academy are TL7 or higher they will also try to build exotroops. Don't do this right now, exotroops are costly to build and require chronimium and >1 autofac per academy.

Don't leave your infantry on a newly-conquered planet unless you are expecting another player to attack it. They won't help with the "industry demands more military defense" message (only stationing ships or building defenses stops this). Use infantry only to attack, to garrison vulnerable planets against other players' attacks, and to suppress civil wars. Transfer infantry down to your capital when you're AFK so that they don't get destroyed in their defenseless transports by another player.

At some point you might add a trade hub to reduce the number of individual trade routes. Not everyone uses hubs; Dorne conquered over half the planets in Beta I and rarely used them. I like hubs but they're finicky. If you use hubs, build and station lots of defenses on them and be careful that every planet isn't importing consumer goods from hubs right away unless you have a huge surplus. Hazardous-world consumer goods autofacs that are being asked to export more than they can produce have a tendency to go into civil war after a while. If you are going to trade trillum through a hub, keep two or more extractors connected to it. I've also seen this happen with jumpship parts, luxury goods and hexacarbide. You might as well build a ton of defenses on your hubs since they don't have anything else to do with the labor. HEL cannons + hypersonic missiles is a pretty decent defense combo early on.

Foundations can raise other planets' TL but need lots of consumer goods themselves, since their TL rises to match the capital. Foundations tend to produce a lot of TLs so it's safe to allocate labor to defenses on them as long as you ensure the foundation is still generating a surplus of 10-20 TLs

It's always a good idea to build fusion programs on TL 5 worlds if you can't supply them from a foundation. Going from TL 5 to TL 6 results in an immediate increase in labor production without much or any population penalty. It also makes more habitat structures available, as well as hypersonic missile defenses, which are the only really good missiles in the game.

Don't raise every planet to TL 7 or higher right away. TL 7 is when planets start demanding luxury goods. At TL 10 demand for luxuries is enormous. You'll need a lot of dedicated consumer autofacs to supply a high-tech empire and have it remain productive.

Regions of space where worlds are densely clustered are more valuable than regions where planets are spread out. When planning to start a new sector capital, try to place it in range of a few dense clusters and good planets that will be able to supply it. A sector capital will be able to grow a region into an industrial powerhouse for your empire if there are a couple of independent earthlike or ocean worlds, two planets with abundant trillum, and a couple planets with at least major chronimium within a 200 light year radius of the sector capital or a hub supplying it.

If you are using trade hubs, put your hubs within 50 LY of capitals to ensure that every planet within range of the hub is under the capital's influence. This is not an absolute rule and some clever geometries use alternate spacing of hubs and capitals.

Eventually, build starship yards close (<50LY) to your capitals, hubs and foundations so that you can quickly reinforce these planets with heavy starships.

Avoid Game-Ruining Mistakes and Known Bugs:

Don't build tech programs on your capital until you have a chronimium processor planet that it can import from. Your starting capital will never have chronimium deposits. At TL 8 Vanguards are replaced by Helions, which require chronimium. At TL 9 every ship class except Adamants is replaced by higher-tech ships that require chronimium. If you go all the way up to TL 10 your capital will only be able to build infantry until you get a chronimium processor hooked up. Rarely, your starting capital have have a TL higher than 7 and be in the process of regressing back to TL 7; this will happen if your capital world was recently part of another empire but went independent.

Don't switch to a different doctrine until you have at least one jumpship yard planet and jumpship autofac planet. The default Fire & Movement doctrine is the only one that builds jumptransports on sector capitals. Without a jumpbeacon (a property of the jumpship yard designation), your jumpfleets will not be able to move. Without jumptransports, you won't be able to conquer more planets. You can buy transports from Mesophon, but you need transports to sell resources to them in the first place unless you are in the Trade & Enterprise doctrine (you also need to have a Mesophon world within beacon range, or the process will be very slow since you'll have to move stuff at gunship speed.)

A trillum shortage on a hazardous world can lead to survival goods shortages and mass deaths. Use transports to dump a couple thousand tons of trillum onto hazardous planets before you redesignate them as anything that requires a lot of trillum (consumer goods autofac, chronimium refinery, etc.) It takes a while for the planet to adjust the amount of trillum it produces/imports.

Try not to use hazardous planets as consumer goods autofacs. Consumer goods autofac planets that are hazardous (any planet that is not earthlike, ocean, underground, desert or empyreal) can suffer mass deaths if they are being asked to export more consumer goods than they can build. There is a bug which can cause labor to sometimes be allocated away from the habitat structure for a few turns, and it won't build enough survival goods to sustain the population. Earthlike worlds are the best CG autofacs, closely followed by Ocean worlds. Both classes of worlds get a hidden bonus to producing organic food.

If a planet is importing from two or more extractors or autofacs of the same type, it will automatically divide its imports evenly among the worlds, even if some of the planets are producing more and some are producing less (because of differences in efficiency/population/labor allocation). You may have to fiddle with % import allocations to keep your planets from running resource shortages because of this. This is especially important for trade hubs.

Attacking another player whose imperial might is less than 50% yours will depress social order on some of your planets; they may even go into civil war. The penalty is imposed for each individual attack. Civil wars are annoying but not crippling; players can still occasionally take a planet or two from a weaker player without destroying their own empires, so watch out!

Imperial might is based on population, NOT military strength! If you conquer a bunch of lousy planets without building fleets and defenses for them you'll become vulnerable to attack by players who previously wouldn't touch you due to imperial might differences.

If a planet is "rebelling", remove infantry other than imperial guards. Don't send more, unless they're imperial guards.. When a planet enters civil war about half the infantry stationed on it defect to the rebels. Once a planet is in civil war it's safe to send infantry back in. You want at least 4x as many ground forces as the rebels to guarantee victory. Players with the Law & Order doctrine can build imperial guards, which never join rebels.

Big fleets containing hundreds of thousands of ships of the same type may have firing range problems. You may want to split up these fleets before launching an attack with them. This is a major problem for ships with very short firing ranges, like the Stinger.

Trade and Enterprise is a dangerous doctrine to leave. T&E turns your capitals into trade hubs, which eliminates the need to maintain separate hubs. If you switch out of T&E, all the trade routes running through your capitals will break. If you've designed your empire around T&E capitals but then need to leave the doctrine for any reason, you MUST reroute all your trade routes or your economy will collapse immediately when you switch. This is especially important if you have lots of high-TL planets. High TL planets are likely to go into civil war if there's any interruption to their consumer goods or trillum supply.

If you remove all labor from the "militia base" structure on a trade hub or autonomous world, the base will disappear. You won't be able to build infantry on that world again until you redesignate it.

WTVd0's General Gameplay tips

Planet tips

Planetary defense structures increase social order on worlds (decreasing the likelihood that they will go into civil war), even if the structures don't have any WUs allocated to them and aren't building units. You might as well build three kinds of defenses even if you don't intend to actually use any or all of them. Be sure to remove the default 5% labor allocation after the structures are built though, or your worlds' productivity will be hurt by having to build many different kinds of defense units.

If you capture a world with a big stockpile of some resource, it's safe to either set up trade routes that export more of the resource than the production structure is building, or to allocate most labor on the planet to defenses instead of production. Independent worlds will never generate resource surpluses, but independent planets that revolted from another player at some point will retain any resource stockpile that was already present. Different resources have varying attrition rates; hexacarbide does not undergo attrition at all, while chtholon and trillum have very long half-lives. Don't forget which worlds are running deficits or you'll have problems when stockpiles eventually run out.

T&E empires should sell resources extracted from "abundant" deposits or manufactured ship components only. It's not cost-effective to sell resources from "major" deposits or lower, since these resources require 2x or more labor to extract but sell for the same price. Mineral-poor T&E empires should sell ship components- the main cost element of building ship components is the labor that goes into them and minerals only make up a small part of their WU cost to build.

Even if you aren't in the T&E doctrine, you can put resources in transports, take them to a Mesophon world, and sell the resources for aes. You can use the aes to buy more transports, freeing you to build more basic jumpships or jumpcruisers and fewer transports. Sell high-value resources like ship components to maximize your profits per trip. You can't buy from a Mesophon planet unless you have a fleet in orbit. You need to be able to get your jumptransports there somehow- either have a beacon near it, or convoy them with gunships.

Trade tips

Trade routes are one-way. If you want two planets to import from one another, use the "import from" button on both planets. Arrows indicate the direction of trade

Planets only export resources produced by their primary (designated) structure. Resources will only be exported if there is a demand for them; a jumpship autofac planet can't export anything to an aetherium processor planet, and a TL 5 jumpship autofac can't export anything to a TL 10 jumpship yard (which only uses high-TL components that the TL 5 autofac can't build).

You can't pass resources through more than two connected trade hubs.

Don't set connected trade hubs to import the same resource from one another; they may bug out and start swapping huge amounts for no reason.

Foundation TLs aren't passed through trade hubs. They must come directly from the foundation.

A planet that's importing a resource from multiple planets will continue to function if one of the supplying planets is captured; demand will be shifted to the remaining planets.

Unit tips

Units were recently rebalanced and nobody has found the best strategies to use with them yet. Test and report back!

Click the planet button on the far right upper corner during combat to see the actual combat and issue commands.

Ship wings can get a bunch of first strikes against their target if their weapons have longer range than the target and can keep firing on it even after it moves out of retaliation range.

BASIC JUMPSHIPS HAVE POINT DEFENSE. THEY INTERCEPT MISSILES! They are very good against units that use missiles, especially if you can assemble a giant fleet. Eldritch point defense is twice as effective as Stinger point defense. Starfrigates and high-TL starcruisers also have missile protection, but it's not as complete since capital ship fleets tend to be smaller.

Never mix transport types during a planetary invasion. Use ONLY Reliants or ONLY Warphants in an invasion. Have all your invading transports in the same fleet or your infantry won't all land at the same time and will take extra casualties.

Warphant transports cost a lot more than Reliants but have the same cargo capacity. However, they move and land faster.

Transports will be attacked by defending ships and long-ranged defense structures during invasions, so you might want to destroy all defenders before sending the transports to the planet as a separate fleet.

Transports have a capacity of 20 tons. All minerals and consumer goods weigh 1 ton per unit. Other resources weigh different amounts. Basic infantry and imperial guards weigh 20 tons, armored infantry weigh 30 tons and exotroops weigh 25 tons. They can still be transported in transports; apparently the units get split between multiple transports.

Armored infantry are a big improvement over basic infantry but need dedicated academy and autofac worlds. They are still worth producing ASAP since they will decrease the number of transports you need. Exotroops are even stronger and 5 tons lighter but need a lot of dedicated autofacs (3 or more) for every academy producing 100% exotroops.

Below TL 9, one autofac will fully supply an equivalent yard assigning 50% labor to Stingers and 50% labor to Adamants. To build 100% Eldritches, you also want a 1:1 ratio. Under the Fire & Movement doctrine, capitals and sector capitals build jumpships and can also build their own components rather than importing them, but capitals that build their own components will build fewer ships.

Gunships and explorers are the only ships that don't need components to build.

Defense tips

Please test the newly rebalanced defenses and report your results. Defenses have the same cost but are now mostly much more damaging, longer-ranged, and heavily armored.

Jumpmissiles are most effective when fired at fleets that haven't reached planets yet. Fleets in orbit can intercept jumpmissiles if they include ship classes with missile protection (basic jumpships, starfrigates, high-TL starcruisers.) Each Partisan-class jumpmissiles fires 16 warheads that do 180 damage each. These warhead submunitions are very resilient; it takes 8 Stingers to intercept each warhead.

Jumpmissiles seem to automatically fire against invading fleets. They can't be fired if their planet is outside of the control radius of an imperial or sector capital.

Jumpmissiles can still be used even if the planet that built them gets designated as something other than a citadel. They remain subject to attrition, though, so stockpiles on non-citadel worlds will shrink over time.

One effective defense strategy is to build both HEL cannons and hypersonic missiles. The missiles do big damage to anything that isn't a jumpship or capital ship; in order to destroy the missile silos most types of ships will have to close to within range of the cannons.

For really big empires, it used to be impossible to build enough planetary defenses on any given planet to fend off an Eldritch or staggered Helion-Eldritch attack by a similar-sized empire. Important worlds could only realistically be defended by massed starfrigates AND hypersonic missiles together. This may no longer be the case.

Empire and Doctrine tips

You can't send messages to another empire until you've found their capital. If they've sent you a message, it will reveal their capital no matter where it is.

For citadels and for the imperial capital under the Trade and Enterprise tab, the "import from" button is moved to the Structures tab.

Some empires are NPEs (non-player empires); these are either "warlord empires" or sector capitals that defected from a player. (Mesophon Traders is also an NPC empire). Secession empires are some variation on the name of the empire they defected from, or they may be named after their capital planet. Warlord and secession empires never do anything unless George (the developer) is messing around with them. They are safe to attack, but you will still get social order penalties if their imperial might is less than half yours.

Few questions which I've actually been wondering about at length since I started playing last year:

1. What is the optimal tech level on worlds which support habitat structures, for maximum population and production, but minimal resource use per unit population, with all level-appropriate habitats built?

2. In my view, for production worlds earth-like, ocean and underground classes should be advanced to TL8 in order to build a planetary arcology. Similarly, inhospitable worlds should be advanced to TL7 to build the sealed/shielded arcologies. Desert/empyreal worlds should be advanced to TL5 for maximum population. Is this optimal?

3. The funny thing is, I had a desert trillum world at TL5 with higher population than a similar one with comparable efficiency at TL10, and the TL10 produces a LOT more trillum. Therefore I'm assuming that tech level has a higher impact on production than population does. I understand also that the requirement for consumer goods is proportional to, if not exponentially correlated with, tech level. Which is the better trade off in this case?

4. Is it really worth it to advance ANY world to TL10, apart from those in that state by default? The Undine, Megathere and Typhon are absurdly expensive, and their performance in combat is... questionable at best. For those prices, one would expect a post-industrial warfleet to completely annihilate anything unless outnumbered by more than 5 to 1 (hint: they don't) At present I would much rather invest in a strong Minotaur fleet with a small Eldritch escort.

"Live long and may the Force be ever in your favour, Mr. Potter"
-- Gandalf (The Chronicles of Narnia)

We would be able to figure it out if we knew what the WU output/population was at each TL at 100% efficiency, but right now I don't have those figures.

Note that this is complicated somewhat by resource costs, since some resources require trillum (which is affected by abundance - organic food is also affected by world type, but I think it is only a minor cost relative to other resources). Planets that have a sealed/shielded arcology as their apex structure both consume trillum for that and have an unavoidable overall WU penalty from having to diversify industry between it and the primary structure, which earthlike/ocean/underground/desert/empyreal worlds can avoid.